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In the last post—not the lagniappe one but the ExpoFestO’Rama one—I was in such a hurry to get the damn thing posted that I neglected to mention what made this a multimedia ExpoEtCetera, rather than just a weekend of watching dvd’s.  Having been allowed to exeunt LuthorCorp at 3:30 on Friday afternoon, I decided to dodge the raindrops by riding the bus up Third Avenue and heading to Kitchen Arts and Letters, my home away from home, my office away from office, one of the trinity (along with King Arthur Flour and Penzeys Spices) to which LuthorCorp should be addressing my paychecks; really, putting my name and address on them is just a formality.  I have been shopping at Kitchen Arts since I moved to New York 15 years ago.  Since I received my happy news from the Egg Board, I have been spending some significant time there, flipping through bibliographies, snapping up 18th and 19th-century cookbooks in facsimile, farming tracts, English and French court histories, translations of Cato and Platina, all of which will be joining me in Arkansas in a couple of weeks.  Friday, though, Friday was special:  I’d made a promise to myself, nothing but fun reading for you this weekend, babe, and damned if I wasn’t going to keep it.  This, I realize, makes me sound just a little pathetic:  here I am, in the self-described Greatest City in the World, and when I want to go wild, I buy books!  Much like Elizabeth Leopold in Laurie Colwin’s short story “An Old-Fashioned Story” (which can be found here), it feels like a luxury now to flout the syllabus and read something just for the hell of it.

Having decided I wanted to relax a bit, I found myself falling headlong into Barbara Santich’s Looking for Flavour (published in Australia by Wakefield Press in 1996).  It is not relaxing reading; it is rigorous and scrupulous and thoughtful and keenly observant.  While I don’t believe you can judge a book by its cover, you can tell volumes about it by the first sentence, and this one, the first sentence of the title essay, is a lulu:  “I didn’t think so at the time, but I recognise now that in the environmentally sensitive 1990’s the title I had chosen for one of my articles was highly provocative:  ‘Flavour first, rainforests second.’” Provocative, yes, and made more so by the essay’s epigraph, a quote from Dylan Thomas:  “What’s the smell of parsley?” In other essays, Santich ponders the nature of Australian cuisine and its study; regionalism in Australia; the thorny issue of recipe ownership; kangaroo steamers and carpetbag steak.  The temptation to quote the whole book is strong, but because I’m not that crazy, I will share with you my favorite examples thus far:

The flavour fanatic Dr. Max Lake has developed a theory to explain all this [the idea that flavor is an evocation, that certain tastes embody certain memories and meanings].  Primitive animals, such as the earthworm, began with simply a ‘taste brain’ that responded to chemical sensations—the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (a savoury quality represented by MSG).  Later came the ‘smell brain’, which reached its greatest development in the koala, one of the most particular of animals in its choice of food.  We still possess a rudimentary ‘taste brain’ and ‘smell brain’, though these are overshadowed by the intelligent brain.  The ‘smell brain’ complex includes a component known as the hippocampus which, among other things, preserves our past; Max Lake calls it ‘the library of long memory.’ This elegantly complex organ serves as a logical base to the magical power of flavour and smell—aromas that construct whole cities, tastes that call up friends as effectively as Aladdin’s magic lamp.  It’s the hippocampus, sparked by messages from a sip of lime tea and a crumb of madeleine, that started Proust on his nostalgic reverie.  Further, the integration of the ‘smell brain’ with various other parts of the cerebral system means the involvement of emotions, so that a particular aroma or flavour might influence the way we feel.  Reciprocally, our emotional state also has a bearing on how we taste; absorbed in the monochromatic underworld of self-pity, we lose all sense of smell and flavour.

This is the way I write in my dreams, words so lucid and potent that I read them over and over, just to absorb the sheer rightness of them.  Lest you think Santich is only about brainy considerations, let me assure you that she has a puckish sense of humor indeed.  Here she is again, on the development of a food-writing language:

The naivety of children often allws them to make, more easily than artful adults, the imaginative, sensual-literalist leaps of language that magically and instantaneously transform a taste experience.  Christopher Driver’s four-year-old daughter reported that a salad of baby squid tasted of spiders; and my three-year-old son, waking up to a batch of cherry tartlets—I had used pale pink cherries which, on cooking, had become fleshily translucent—exclaimed with pleasure, ‘Nipple tarts!’ Baudelaire would, I’m sure, approve.

It was an entirely different first line that led me to Abe Opincar’s Fried Butter:  A Food Memoir.  (The title refers to the sunny-side-up eggs his mother lived on while she was pregnant with him, and the butter in which those eggs were fried.) I will confess that I have been wary of food memoirs ever since I encountered one whose charms still elude me, and the fact that Opincar’s book has an impressive publishing pedigree (Soho Press) did little to assuage my fears.  I picked it up and turned to page 1 and read:  “I baked a chicken the night I left my wife.” I knew at that moment what Tolstoy meant when he spoke of Art as Infection.  I was infected.  Again, I have to fight to not quote the whole book, Opincar’s tales of his aunt who threw a plate of mamaliga at his father’s head and went insane shortly thereafter; of his friend Niang, whose first exposure to candied yams at Thanksgiving triggered harrowing memories of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; of his Iranian friend Reza’s offering a plate of saffron rice to his neighbors, who wordlessly left the dirty empty plate at his doorstep; of the orange grove planted by a pair of lovers, one of whom died, the other of whom left a note in the house one day:  “To Whom It May Concern:  I don’t want this house”.  Instead, I will leave a fragment, but only a fragment, of that stunning essay with that stunning first line:

“He monopolized my time on my honeymoon,” is what my wife told Star and Bob, our marriage counselors, by way of expressing her past and present dissatisfactions.  I sat there and wondered about my wife’s use of the possessive, ”my honeymoon.” But what did I know?  I wasn’t sure of much.  The only think I knew for certain was that I was paying $185 an hour to a husband-and-wife team named Star and Bob to listen to my wife complain that I’d monopolized her time on her honeymoon.
“Interesting,” murmured Star, toying with her chunky ethnic necklace.  Bob picked imaginary lint off his taupe corduroys.  Star, eyes wide with bland compassion, turned to me.  “What are you feeling?”

I suppose every failed marriage has its own Dealey Plaza, Texas School Book Depository, grassy knoll.  Its own Star and Bob.  A mystery point where fatigue, despair and anger find triangulation.  Motives forever remain murky; history changed nonetheless.  When I left Star and Bob’s office, I knew I would never come back.

Because I’ve been so enamored of these books, I haven’t had a chance to crack open Peanuts:  The Illustrated History of the Goober Pea by Andrew F. Smith, who taught my culinary history survey class at the New School.  Andy Smith has also written books on tomatoes (two of ‘em), ketchup and popcorn, and he is working on a book about turkeys.  His scholarship is exhaustive, but his writing style is accessible and enthusiastic.  While these books should definitely be read as a coherent whole, I can guarantee you that if you just flip open to a page at random, you will learn something you never knew before, something that you will be glad to know.  I open Peanuts to page 60:  ‘In a 1912 issue of Good Housekeeping, Gertrude R. Lombard provided a recipe for “Cabbage and Peanut Salad, in which she sprinkled ‘one cupful of salted peanuts freed from their skins’ on shredded cabbage.  She also recommended that peanut butter and mayonnaise be combined to make a dressing for salads.” I am glad to know it, but gladder still that I’ll never have to eat it.

Because it’s worth an entry all its own, I will not elaborate now on my purchase of the late Alan Davidson’s essay collection A Kipper With My Tea.  It is enough, for now, to say that I have it and I’m thrilled.  But I can’t mention Alan Davidson without mentioning that the new issue of PPC, the magazine he founded, is on sale now, and it contains a new essay by Alastair Bland, who charmed me so with his essay “Eating Wild in Urban America.” This time out, young Mr. Bland discovers the joy of “Making Your Own Wine in Two Weeks.” The secret is to ferment anything but grapes:  tomatoes, ginger, ginger and peppercorns, beets, onions, lemons, lima beans.  His wines are based on the wines he encountered in Belize, including but not limited to cashews, mangoes, breadfruit and carrots.  In his words, “It was all pretty decent and certainly had alcohol in it, and from what I understood, the process was simply to dump some sugar and fruit into a bucket, seal the top, and get drunk a few weeks later.” It is an exciting thing, witnessing the emergence of a writer I could read happily for years. He is a scholar and a pilgrim, and though he doesn’t know it yet, he is my pal.